xactly what we ought
not to do. You know it, don't you? So do I. Nothing can stop us, can it?
Good-bye!"

CHAPTER XIV THE BARGAIN

If a man's grief does not awaken his dignity, then he has none. In that
event, grief is not even respectable. And so it was with Leroy Mortimer
when Lydia at last turned on him. If you caress an Angora too long and
too persistently it runs away. And before it goes it scratches.

Under all the physical degeneration of mind and flesh there had still
remained in Mortimer the capacity for animal affection; and that does
not mean sensuality alone, but generosity and a sort of routine devotion
as characteristic components of a character which had now disintegrated
into the simplest and most primitive elements.

Lydia Vyse left Saratoga when the financial stringency began to make it
unpleasant for her to remain. She told Mortimer without the slightest
compunction that she was going.

He did not believe her and he gave her the new car--the big
yellow-and-black Serin-Chanteur. She sold it the same day to a
bookmaker--an old friend of hers; withdrew several jewels from
limbo--gems which Mortimer had given her--and gathered together
everything for which, if he turned ugly, she might not be criminally
liable.

She had never liked him--she had long disliked him. Such women have an
instinct for their own kind, and no matter how low in the scale a man
of the other kind sinks he can never entirely supply the type of running
mate that such women require, understand, and usually conceive a passion
for.

Not liking him she had no hesitation in the matter; disliking him,
whatever unpleasant had occurred during their companionship remained as
an irritant to poison memory. She resented a thousand little incidents
that he scarcely knew had ever existed, but which she treasured without
wasting emotion until the sum total and the time coincided to retaliate.
Not that she would have cared to harm him seriously; she was willing
enough to disoblige him, however--decorate him, before she left him,
with one extra scratch for the sake of auld lang syne. So she wrote a
note to the governors of the Patroons Club, saying that both Quarrier
and Mortimer were aware that the guilt of her escapade could not be
attached to Siward; that she knew nothing of Siward, had accepted his
wager without meaning to attempt to win it, had never again seen him,
and had, on the impulse of the moment, made her entry in the wake of
s